@Bees

“I want the base site polished and balanced before they start any new big projects.”

This. Exactly this.

I agree with people who have said that the economy needs balanced. It feels a little hard to get moonstones, other than buying them with IRL currency. Or unless you have cool wolves that you're breeding and selling for MS. There's probably some other things that could be balanced a bit more, but the economy is really the only one I'm worried (kind of a strong word for what I'm feeling, but >>) about. I also hope that all "cool" things won't be locked behind MS.

Despite that, I am having fun :D The grind doesn't feel too bad.. (and I hate grinding) And the fact that you don't have to wait a specific time to continue the grind (unless you have no food) is nice. I hate games (mainly mobile games) where you use up energy and have to wait 8 hours for your bar to fill before you can do anything. So it's nice that you can feed your wolf(wolves) and continue.

I do wish this site a successful future (I love petsites after all), but am rather skeptical at the moment.

On one hand I agree that it's kinda unfair to compare a fresh launch to the geriatric Flight Rising, but on the other — I feel like FR launched during an entirely different era and has been around for long enough since then to provide newer petsims a chance to learn from its mistakes and shortcomings and do better.

If I started talking about it right now, the list of complaints I have for Lorwolf would turn out to be very long, but most of it would ultimately boil down to "economy issues".

Pebbles are basically worthless due to lack of good treasure sinks, so no matter how many I manage to hoard — they can't buy me anything of value. At this point looking at my currency tab and seeing loads of pebbles just feels disheartening. Like, yeah, I might be a dollar millionaire, but those are Zimbabwean dollars.

The amount of moonstones one can get through onsite activity is negligible. So at the moment, unless I pay this site real life money (and quite a lot of it too), I'm basically locked out of the site's fun content. Breed changes and genes that look any different from the basic ones so that I could have fun with breeding projects, cool apparel for my wolves, all the pretty looking wolves on the marketplace... All the things I'm supposed to be grinding for.

Ideally, this problem should've been thought and taken care of before the official launch, but since they couldn't do it with all the time they had before it — I'm not sure that the staff will be able to churn out something worthwhile soon enough. Because once this initial popularity boost ends, it's all word of mouth from there. The game probably will retain a cult following even after people start leaving, but that might not be enough to keep it afloat.

If the miracle happens — great! If not — well, I'm too poor to have any 4-digit wolves/kickstarter items/other valuables, so I personally won't be losing much. My condolences to those who will.

Ngl it's really interesting readying the conflicting opinions here

With the recent update on allowing CA's to be sold in pebbles ,and the current event having 2 new companions for 200k pebbles and other things, the new pebble sinks have even emptied out the pebbles in the FM for a shortwhile driving the price even lower than 9k at one point. Kinda love the fact people can now sell CA's for pebbles, makes it more accessible to those who don't wanna trade their pebbles for MS's.

People could always sell CA's for pebbles, as far as I knew, just no one was doing it until they allowed the price changes to go into effect.

I'm back from the first time I commented on page one with an update to my opinion! I now have no faith what-so-ever!

F2P is always gonna be the majority and is ultimately the bedrock that a sites economy is built on, and right now there is no way a F2P user is gonna be able to earn enough MS to do... anything. No one is willing to spend even a single MS on anything a F2P player can get without spending days grinding. Why would they? Paying users are gonna spend their MS on customizing their wolves, not on food or ore or anything else a F2P user have. Selling their MS for pebbles? Pebbles are worthless! They're worth nothing, because everything cost MS! No one needs pebbles!

F2P users are getting reamed, hard, (getting more tabs in your lair costs MS what the actual fu-) and as it looks now I've just, y'know, given up. Unless they do a 180 in the future, it's gonna be a handful of whales keeping the site alive simply on sunk-cost fallacy, while everyone else will leave.

But, Hey, they're maybe adding puppy apparel. Surely that won't be yet another thing that only the paying users will be able to use! /s

I don't really feel like writing an essay at the moment, but wanted to throw some thoughts into the ring. These are my own thoughts - it's okay if others disagree. This is just how I feel from 20+ years playing petsites and a professional background in development of digital platforms.

• The economy is new. Do not expect the premium:F2P currency ratio to be balanced this early on. There hasn't been enough time for users to buy and pump enough premium currency in the economy to broadly circulate. I would argue that FR is absolutely swarmed with gems, and a lot of that is a heritage of buildup from the years of premium currency that was purchased.
  
  
• Pebbles are not worthless if you care about collecting and kitting out wolves. I have gone through insane amounts of pebbles expanding my dens and still haven't gotten companions for all of my favorites. Maybe I'm an outlier but that's a big pebble sink that I think a lot of people aren't as actively using yet. I frequently am one of those people who buys pebbles from the Flea Market with moonstones because I just don't have time to grind millions of pebbles like others do and I constantly need them.
  
  
• I feel like the site staff are being given short shrift. It's the same with any game, really. The expectations set on what they do with their time as a small team with an already busy schedule are too high. Development, art, planning - all of this takes WAY more time than you think it does. Add on daily or weekly communication through all this and you've got a massive headache. I am very impressed with the quality that this site has achieved just at this point, with such a small production team.
  
  
• Overall, the gameplay loop is really satisfying. I can't say that about any other petsite I've played, to be honest. If I feel like playing LW, I don't ever really sit and wonder what I should be doing. I'm bouncing between professions, checking the Flea Market, editing my den, etc. I like that professions look to be the future of the gameplay loop; they set LW apart. They will be a challenge to continue to balance but I look forward to everything that's to come!

Honestly I have really high hopes! I know some people are stressed and vocal about it, but to me that also says they really care because they like the game. Imo the dev team is doing their best, which is quite good, to address things and fix them and grow into how to run a site like this. I think all the issues make a lot of sense for this early, and that things will settle. The game is still very fun already, so I think it'll keep going!

I think that as with all games that people are passionate about, the loudest people will be the most critical. I don't get the sense that it's actually the majority though.

I also wanted to say that for me, I am constantly out of pebbles, and mostly sell things and wolves for pebbles because I keep spending them all. So from my playstyle of wanting all my wolves dressed and have space for a bunch of them, I am constantly in need of more pebbles and never have enough. I just really feel that a lot of the criticism, which is valid and people are allowed to feel, is unreasonably high expectations for such a small and green team, and that it somewhat feels that some people are getting spiraled into a frenzy amongst each other. I don't mean that to say that the issues people talk about aren't worth vocalizing, just that I think most people are actually just playing and enjoying the game, and that reading a heated discussion can end up creating more heated responses and can paint a picture that doesn't always reflect reality.
There are a lot of accusations of predation and dark intentions that I just don't think are true. I've said it on other threads before, but if someone with tech skill wanted to maliciously prey on people, they absolutely would not pick the extremely niche subgenre of pet sims to do so. It's been well over a decade since the fall of Neopets, and since then it's just not a category of games that most people play, and is therefore not logically lucrative if the only goal is making money and taking advantage of people.

While I do think it would have been better for part of their update to explicitly say that certain features are intended to alter the economy balance, to me it was self-evident that the apparel, companions, profession buffs, and more importantly custom apparel sell options being altered at will automatically makes them an attempt at pebble balancing. I think it would be helpful for everyone if they at least shared their stance on the profession upgrades ms vs. pebbles issue, but for me, that's the only thing I have real criticism for.

So all that said, I have faith that the site will only get better, and that it's still been incredibly fun, and I was someone who played FR every day for hours a day, and since this has released, I still just... don't really want to play FR. And I'm nature flight, and we just had our festival! And still I barely logged on. Every person has personal preference, and I do not speak for anyone but myself, but I do know that if I am having fun, there are other people who are as well.

I have hope TBH. I find this way more enjoyable so far then say, FR or Wolvden/Lioden

I would also like to add on those saying they dont have hope, we all need to remember, this just launched VERY VERY VERY recently, things take time AND money to go into effect. We are not sure what is going on in the background as we cant see. Yes, more openness by the staff would help ease most minds, and we can hope they find their groove to do so soon, but I would not worry so much just yet. Give it some time to work out the kinks.